On Wed, Oct 01, 2025 at 10:29:21PM +0200, Ondřej Surý wrote: > Hi, Hi Ondřej,
> I would like to open a discussion on whether we can remove src:db5.3 from > Debian. > (Or at least cut down the list of the downstream packages using it...) this is not a new discussion (#987013). > It has been horribly outdated, orphaned, and there are much better > replacements available. > > And if we don't ever start, we will be stuck with this into next release > cycle and then next > pretending that everything is fine Noone is pretending that everything is fine, but removing it is more work than you are assuming. > This list of Depends isn't actually that horrible (see below), so I can > probably walk this through > by hand and identify what actually matters... >... > This is src:db5.3 ... > This is src:db-defaults: >... > perl: libdb-dev >... > python3.13: libdb-dev >... The interesting part begins when trying to identify all software that transitively uses BDB through the Perl or Python modules, which do not require package dependencies. > I think that most of the software includes BDB > for legacy reasons. Plenty of software is still using BDB databases, the hard part is properly handling data migration - both for packaged software and software locally used by the user. Like changing Python to use GDBM for the dbm module is easy, but when doing so without a proper migration users of the module lose their existing databases. >... > exim4: libdb5.3-dev >... > postfix: libdb-dev >... These might be using BDB for legacy reasons, but they are using it. > Ondrej >... cu Adrian
